Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Quebec and Facebook have a weird relationship

There were two unrelated but equally weird and disturbing Facebook-related cases I saw out of Quebec recently. In the first case, police in Montreal did an overnight, guns-drawn raid on a man accused of posting death threats on Facebook. The man-child–28 years old and still living at home in a bedroom filled with video game paraphernalia–claims it’s all a misunderstanding and that he was just trash-talking about video games. His parents support his story. Are you ready for the creepy part? Police seem to have been encouraged to make the raid because they were able to use Canada’s recently-renewed federal gun registry to match the IP address up to a gun-owning home.

The statists would say this is evidence the gun registry works. I’d say it’s evidence that it just leads to paranoia, violations of privacy and anti-gun profiling.

Elsewhere in Quebec, a court upheld an $873 million fine imposed by a California court on Adam Guerbuez, a prolific Facebook spammer. How’d they reach they $873 million charge? By imposing a fine of $200 per spam message sent.

Let’s establish some facts. #1–I hate spam even more than most people. #2–This guy hacked accounts to make the spamming possible. #3–He sounds like a real slug who has tried to exploit his infamy for the past two years.

But $200/message? $873 million for spamming people? He will file for bankruptcy and Facebook will get only a pittance out of him, but just the idea of it is nasty and to see such excessive damages awarded cheapens our court system. On second thought, go ahead and award excessive damages. Cheapen the biased system away, yes!